1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of education and systems and methods providing reminders for students about their attendance and accompanying equipment needs. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a service oriented architecture comprising a networked system including a given students active electronic devices that are adapted to invoke web services; and passive devices, which lack computing capability but have sensors, to provide monitoring, notification and hardware and software upgrade ordering services for these devices by using these devices in conjunction with web based infrastructure components.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
Students, of a particular education system, according to requirements of a classroom or subject, and/or as necessary to facilitate and enhance a student's education, are required to own or possess many types of devices. Typical devices may include, but are not limited to: writing utensils, backpacks, homework, pocketbooks, protractors, textbook, compasses, paper notebooks, pencil sharpeners, lab notebooks, markers, and other devices that are not normally viewed as being electronic in nature, and laptop computers, personal digital assistant, cell phones, pagers, E-notebooks, e-books, e-pencils, calculators, etc. that are electronic in nature. As education technology advances, the amount and types of devices is only expected to increase.
Often, students would like to know “if they have everything” they need to ensure readiness for a particular class, and/or to facilitate student organization and productivity.
Currently, there exist techniques for using a networked system of communications devices to route messages between the devices using wireless technologies such as BlueTooth, for example. Different devices may be further adapted to communicate with devices to communicate with external sources on behalf of the network in order to maintain communications or conserve battery life. Besides these synchronization and transfer techniques for personal area networks, other techniques relate to the use of device identifiers for the purpose of locating a lost device which is part of a network.
In the education domain, wireless infrastructures with networked devices are provided in classroom settings to enable collaboration between the teacher and students or between peer groups of students working in teams. Previously disclosed techniques refer to monitoring and evaluating user device data for the purpose of assessing the efficiency of user task performance in order to provide recommendations on more effective techniques to complete a task. As an example of current practice, Microsoft application software products such as Microsoft Word® currently provide a form of this context aware coaching to end users.
Additionally, there currently exist techniques for using web services to enable automated ordering from online catalogs or notifications to end users of available products or services which meet predefined criteria.
There currently exist techniques in semantic-based capability matching that have been used to discover and compose Web services. A requester of Web services submits the specification of Web services s/he needs to perform his/her tasks, while there is a set of Web services available from service providers with their specification. Often the specification of service requirements and that of available services employ different vocabularies to describe services. To consistently understand the meaning of the specifications and effectively match services requested and provided, the semantic-based capability matching technique utilizes an ontology or semantic model which specifies the relationships among different words or terms such as synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, subsumption, etc. The relationship information enables matching service specifications based on their meaning by identifying, for example, different words with the same meaning or the same words with different meaning, etc. Another prior art of semantic technology is semantically-enhanced search. There has been active research to improve the search results by tagging document and resources over networks and/or desktops with metadata or concepts from semantic models (or ontology) that again specifies the relationships among different words or terms in related domains.
While such systems address various aspects of providing tools to enable the student to locate lost equipment, order upgrades and improve task performance, it would be highly desirable to provide a comprehensive end-to-end system which combines these previously disclosed techniques into a system for providing students with accurate and timely reminders of which devices to bring or leave home, and to receive alerts when hardware or software upgrade orders are required to enable the student to meet class task assignment performance criteria.